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Comment by throwaway7281 | Hacker News Reader

Nice to see Linux in automotive. Recently, Daimler CEO mentioned that they understand now, that they need an operating system.

Guess what, he said: "think of Windows for cars"

That made me laugh hard. If they do what he says, it will be just another nail in the coffin of good ol' Daimler.

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I am working for the Daimler daughter which is building the next next-gen Infotainment system. Curious to hear what your concrete concerns are--given the alternatives (buying in to Android or some other ecosystem), what would you do?

QNX/Linux/eCos/Sciopta

What is it that you really need, more than CAN, SOME/IP and a small Web-Server/-Client ?

Sciopta can even be bought ASIL-D/SIL3 certified.

Fills your 4MB flash not even half

Windows for cars has existed for a while! I worked on a project using "Windows Embedded Automotive", I didn't particularly enjoy it.

Oh, my car had¹ an infotainment system based on Windows for Automotive. It even included the .NET runtime! It was fun to reverse it and.. to reimplement the ECU using a Linux board.

OS for what ? for the entertainment system Windows might be better, you get official support and it should be fairly stable since you strip everything unnecessary from it.

Microsoft tried that, and it failed so hard they pretty much pretend it never existed. That world is ruled by Linux (and sometimes QNX) today.

Server room is ruled by Linux, on the embedded space there are other better suited RTOS alternatives, alongside the commercial ones, all the beloved FOSS alternatives are MIT/BSD based.

And even on server room, thanks to cloud, managed runtimes and servless, Linux's relevance is going to don't matter in the upcoming decade.

The specific context mentioned was integrated entertainment systems in cars, and no, there are no "better suited RTOS alternatives" in common use there. It's Linux or QNX.

Your generic talking points about Linux in other fields are completely irrelevant for that.

Fair enough, then I would point out to the bare metal Qt deployments and Android as well (which the Linux kernel is an implementation detail for the Java and ISO C userspace).

The original Ford Sync, which was developed entirely by Microsoft, was great. Ford decided that they would develop their own UI for the next version on top of Windows Automotive, and it was an absolute mess. They blamed Microsoft, switched the OS to QNX and developed an all new UI, which is still a mess to this day.

I don't think Windows Automotive got a fair shake.

MS made a bad situation worse there - they took over version 2 from the original devs, outsourced maintenance, and pushed back on change requests assuming Ford would let them build V3 from scratch instead of (painfully) improving V2. That, as you know, is not what happened!

Interesting! I didn't know Ford brought Microsoft back on board to try and rescue the disastrous v2. No surprise that that it didn't work out, though. If I remember correctly, the UI was Flash and the hardware was vastly underpowered.

> you get official support

How is that better than paying for Linux support, where there's a market for this service, rather than a monopoly?

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